Can A Question Be A Poem?

That’s the question I’m asking with my new book, I Am Incomplete Without You.

I’m often sent poetry in response to the things that I write, incredibly charged stuff that people have clearly put a lot of time and heart into and if I’m honest, I’m never, ever sure what to do with it. Do I start a conversation entirely in poetry? That doesn’t work. Maybe in movies but not hear in the far more cynical and grey world where your poem might reach me as I am picking up the dog poop in the backyard or wondering why I can’t sleep (and if I’ve actually written enough today to justify my existence).

So I Am Incomplete Without You is half of a conversation. It’s also a kind of springboard into writing some prose, even if you’ve never really thought about writing prose yourself. Every poem I write (I speak only for myself) starts with a sentence, or a picture, or a thought, or a pattern. And so I’ve created a book with incomplete sentences, descriptions of pictures, thoughts, and patterns that can be continued. Like a literary drum circle between two people (making it technically a drum line).

I wrote it mostly in coffee shops in and around Cape Town, I repeated myself a lot because the same questions kept popping up (then I edited brutally), I created instructions because instructions seem like a way of asking questions (will you actually do what I ask you to do?) and I thought about leaves, the sea, living and dying and the questions that form connections between all those different points.